Crisis is an ambiguous construct – part menace, part hope; open as much to the possibility of catharsis as of catastrophe. Our sense of crisis may be framed by the acute moment of onset, but it is defined by the way we respond – how societies react in the short term, absorbing and distributing impact and, perhaps more importantly, how in the aftermath we learn and adapt.

Because the current cluster of calamities is hardly new. It is the contemporary iteration of a long historical timeline. Economic collapse, global pestilence, war – we have been here before. Today, though, there are two important differences. First, the crises from which this book proceeds are all now subsidiary to and linked, directly or indirectly, with a planetary emergency whose scale and imminence are no longer open to doubt. Second, we are as never before in history, possessed of the knowledge, wealth, technological expertise and – at least in principle – global interconnectedness with which to fashion an effective response. In other words, we have every reason to do better, and little choice.

There is a third and, I think, defining factor shaping our prospects of charting a way forward from COVID – and it is the extent to which we choose to do something serious about inequality. Because the idea of crisis discussed in this book is not so much the particular instance of profligate finance or raging pandemic or even climate emergency. It is the quieter, subtler failure in the structural mechanisms through which such systemic breakdown is handled; the underlying slow-burn collapse in relations between people in communities, between citizens and their government, and between governments globally; the disintegration of faith in the shared values which have brought us to this point and which we will need to draw on, revisit – and perhaps radically redefine – as we navigate our way out.

The suggestion of a crisis in liberal values is not to imply their wholesale rejection. It is, rather, to challenge the dominant influence of a particular neoliberal philosophy through which they are interpreted (Fukuyama, 2022); to rebalance the relentless, mindless concentration on individual and market as the indispensable correlates of social meaning; to re-socialise the liberal premise in a form which recognises its values as fundamentally relational; to demonstrate the necessarily collective dimensions through which liberalism is itself made possible.